 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and this is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of EMC World 2012. We are theCUBE, where we bring you the brightest minds in the industry, we extract their knowledge, we share it with you, our community. Go to siliconangle.com, go to wikibond.org. Everything's there, it's open, it's free. You got questions, let us know. You can tweet us, I'm at Dave Vellante, my co-host John Furrier, at Furrier. Let us know if you have any questions. But we are here with Jason Buffington. Jason is a senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. Enterprise ESG is a consultancy, a research firm out of Milford, Mass. They've grown very rapidly over the past 10 or 12 years under the direction of Steve Duplecy, real innovative entrepreneur, and they do a great job. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. And we're also joined by David Floyer, who is my colleague from Wikibon, Wikibon CTO. And we're talking about DataBridge. We just had Rick Wallsworth on. DataBridge is this enterprise mashup. Customers are frustrated. They have all these tools, it's managers of managers, and you always hear, why doesn't some big company step up and allow me to manage my infrastructure with a heterogeneous platform? It sounds like that's what DataBridge is designed to do. Now you just wrote a piece on this, Jason. Take us through, is that the right premise and what's your take on all this? It is the right premise. We just got out of the keynote a few minutes ago. And one of the things we talked about in the keynote was EMC heard the feedback from not that many years ago on how the management tools really needed to kind of grow up. And they did. Prosphere is better than it's ever been before. DPA has gone through some revisions. There's a lot of technologies where if you had one job and the only thing you had to do was back up, you could live in DPA and you'd be fine. Or if you were just a storage guy, you could live in Prosphere and be fine. The challenge is that most of us don't live in one piece of the IT world anymore. Customers are demanding a broader scope visibility. We're seeing folks that want to have control, that they want to have a high level view of what's going on across the board. And when you put that all together, that pane of glass doesn't exist. You could spend all day bouncing through panes of glass. And that's really where EMC stepped up. And that's what DataBridge is about. It's about knitting together all those panes of glass into something which not only pulls it all together, but actually makes it actionable. You know, lifts it up to where you actually can see what's going on. So it seems to me, and I'm no expert in this field. So help me understand the sort of layers of capability. So at the device level, if you will, the array level, you're going to get some really detailed metrics on the devices and maybe hotspots and things like that. You know, you've got a magnifying glass and the thing. And then at other levels, you might be, you know, the 50,000 foot view. And one's too close, one's too far away. Are you saying that products like DataBridge can actually solve that problem and bridge that? Absolutely, because what it does, it knits it together. It lets you create relationships between them. And then most importantly, it lets you customize the view to the level that you need. If you're a 30,000 foot view guy, then it's going to give you just 30,000 foot view information. You're not going to be lost in the weeks. And now you're a deep devil guy. At some point, you've got to get in there. And it's going to knit those pieces together too. You know, there are other companies have tried to do this. And a lot of them, especially when you talk about private cloud architectures, they want to go from the top down. They want to talk about the app and then how the app relates to a service. And maybe it gets down to the hypervisor. But they take for granted all of the stuff that's in the fabric. They take for granted that storage is going to be there. And they take for granted that backup policies are going to work. Databricks works from the other side up. It takes all those plumbing that foundation that you built your house on. And boils it up into something that says, what is your house built on? So David, you were talking in the previous segment about the challenges of mashups. I wonder if you could restate that premise. And let's talk about, you just mentioned that some of the companies haven't succeeded. I want to explore why and why this will succeed. But go ahead, David. So yeah, what we were talking about before was the fact that mashups don't have the best history because of the lack of definition of the sources of those data. What is a outage? What is a drive? All of those things have different definitions from different vendors, from different tools, from different everything else. And so how do you take those disparate things? There seems to be the two ways you can do that. One of which is you can impose an API, a RESTful API or something coming down onto it. Or the second is that you try things out and on an ad hoc basis you learn that A correlates with B. Now, both of those have their disadvantages and both of those, the end of which, you're not certain about the data. There's a high degree of certainty. So talk to me, how do you think that an organization, what should they expect from this? Because I have the feeling that they shouldn't expect that they're going to get perfect data out of this sort of system. They will learn how to shape it into roughly what they need. Is that how you see it? Or do you think you can impose more rigor on it? I do think that they should not expect to see perfect data on day one. Candidly, I'm not sure that all the pieces are entirely there. EMC is still, they're bringing us to one. There's still a lot of people bits and pieces out there. I mean, AppSync isn't sort of tagged on the side. And AppSync is there as one piece of the puzzle. You know, each of these, what they're trying to do is really very aspiration. You're sure? Right, so it's not like they've got this blueprint that says, if they do all these steps, it's guaranteed to provide a perfect set of data on the beginning. I think the other thing which is really important about what's going to help Databrits succeed or not will be the fact of what their investment is in the partner community. What their, EMC is not really looking to knit together a set of data sources where they know all from the very beginning to the end. They're planning on investing in a community where folks that have been looking for instrumentation and folks that have been asking for a piece of information they couldn't get before. You know, now we've given them a set of tools or they've given them a set of tools to say, okay, now you can build these tools. We're going to give you the APIs. We're going to give you a framework of what instrumentation looks like. And then we're going to invest in you, right? In manpower and effort. And then when that nits together, I think that's what's actually going to perfect how the stuff lines up, and it doesn't. I think that's a great answer, but can you talk a little bit more about how they're going to do this? How they think they can achieve this? I mean, people need to be very certain that things are not going to change or have a very clear vision of the future if they're going to invest in products which really go down deep and pull all these stuff together. So can you talk about a couple of things? If I may, it starts with the motivation. So I've always got the sense, and I wonder when you guys think about this, that a big reason why large suppliers never attacked this problem is because they didn't want to. They actually liked the fact that they had these stovepipes because they could make a lot of money out of it. I think times have changed and customers have just said enough, we can't build a cloud infrastructure with all these stovepipes. You have to solve that problem. No third-party software vendor was able to come through and solve that problem. So you've got this sort of perpetuating. They weren't allowed to because they weren't allowed to be given. Right, they were shut out. They were shut out of the information. Whether it was EMC or IBM or HPE or Oracle or whatever, they had a vested interest in keeping the third parties out and sort of controlling the stovepipes. What's your take on that? Yeah, but remember that EMC is in a relatively unique position as far as how broad their vested interest is. It's not like they're just a one-trick pony and the storage was the only thing they're focused on. If it was, then they'd just make pro screw the best of pro screw. And virtualization changes. Absolutely, absolutely. As you get so much broader, their vested interest across the entire ecosystem of all the various things they touch, they're in a unique position to actually drive leadership in this area that most companies don't have the wherewithal or the exposure to do. And who is the competition? The IBMs, the HPEs, the Oracles, CAs, CAs, right? Microsoft. Microsoft, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and is EMC's advantage that they're going to go deeper into solving the customer problems that are stored specific? I think EMC's advantage is that they understand the fabric. And when I say fabric, I mean the blinking lights, they're actually on raised floor. They understand more of them in enterprise environments than just about anybody else. I used the example earlier, say, in the Microsoft model. Microsoft's perspective is the operating system and the applications. They want to look down. They want to launch an application in a service. They have a high price underneath it, but they assume that everything that has blinking lights on it is just going to work, right? I think EMC's perspective coming up from the bottom is they understand what this has to be in compute capacity. They understand the bottom, the underpinnings. And that gives them a different kind of view that I think is going to enable in users, administrators in a way they've never had before. And what's the flip side of that? So that's their advantage. What's the disadvantage? I mean, people don't necessarily look at EMC as the company who's going to bring together all my heterogeneous assets. Is that the flip side of it? Or is that changing? What's the motivation of the people to invest in this? What's the motivation of the players to invest and believe the others will invest as well? Well, so I think it's twofold. One, I do think that virtualization abstracts quite a bit of the heterogeneity of the equation. I also know that when you think about things like the Microsoft and EMC relationship where they're looking top down and that's up, maybe that's a complete story. So it's a partner ecosystem play. And if you'd asked me six months ago, where did I think the hole was going to be? I would say the hole is probably around the awareness of applications and the resilience of the apps. But we just got done talking about apps, right? So. All right, good. All right, Jason, well, listen, thanks for letting us put you on the spot here. A great paper. A great paper. Very good. So check it out. How can people get a hold of that? Is that available on the ESG website? It is on the ESG website. If you follow my blog, I am technicaloptimist.com. We'll follow my tweets, Jbuff, J-B-U-F-F. You'll hear about it later today. Excellent. So check those out at Jbuff. Go to esg.com, download the white paper on DataBridge. It's a great description about 10, 12 pages, a lot of detail. And Jason, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure meeting you. Have a good day. And David, thank you. Thank you. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We have a lot of great guests this afternoon. Mike Clayko is coming up shortly. He's the CEO of Brocade. And keep it right there. We'll be right back.